Cars Drove the Business District North

“Revolutionary changes in modes of transportation have completely transformed every urban community in the last two decades. The character of the people, their wants and their purchasing power change with the years and with the means of transportation and communication. It is for this reason that experienced merchants spend so much time in a study of the movements of the human tide.”

The Influence of Automobiles and Good Roads on Retail Trade Centers, 1927

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With those words the Committee on Business Research at the University of Nebraska opened their report of a 1927 study on the effect of the automobile on consumer habits. The report deals with consumer decisions about where to shop. Shopping patterns were changing as the automobile expanded the area that were easily accessible to the individual consumer. What the report didn’t cover was impact the automobile was having on the size of retail centers.

At the end of the 19^th century any given town had horse related businesses on the edge of the central business district. However, with the coming of automobiles those businesses involved in horse drawn transportation, and the residential areas adjacent to the central business district, were pushed aside.  During the first decades of the 20^th century the people of York watched, and participated, as cars drove the central business district north up Lincoln Avenue. They watched, and participated, as the pace of life quicken.

At the corner of 8^th and Lincoln Avenue, just outside the business district, stood two buildings devoted to the owners of horses and horse drawn equipment. The rest of the 800 and 900 blocks of Lincoln Avenue were residential, complete with a Presbyterian Church.

It is well known that Henry Ford was a major force in the evolution of transportation from horse drawn to horse power being provided by the internal combustion engine.  He began selling his Model T in 1908 and by 1913 had perfected the assembly line which would allow for the mass production of his cars. As the number of cars produced went up, the price of cars came down. In 1913 Ford Motor Company produced over 170,000 units of the Model T which sold for $525. At that price owning an automobile became affordable for middle class Americans and the car became the preferred mode of personal transportation.

In 1914, in the face of this emergent change in transportation technology, a York harness dealer placed a large ad in a local paper stating that “Contrary to all prophecies the day of the horse is not ended.” He was supported in that position by the fact that not far north of his courthouse square business Albert Allen still operated The Farmers Exchange, a horse livery, feed and sale stable at 802 Lincoln Avenue.

The harness dealer, E. C. Knight, was further supported by the fact that on the farm horses dominated the internal combustion engine. It wasn’t until 1945 that tractors provided more power for agricultural work than did horses. Yet near future would bring major changes.

None the less, in 1916 Mr. Allen sold his livery barn to three men who planned to move their automobile dealership, the York Auto Company, into the building. The livery building was repurposed in part by opening up large windows onto the corner of 8^th and Lincoln. That move marked the beginning of an expansion of the central business district into the adjacent two block area of Lincoln Avenue which had previously been residential. 

 

 

Next door at 812 Lincoln Avenue stood a business owned by Norman Tilden. It had originally been a carriage repair shop, but in 1912 he announced that he had “decided to engage in the auto repair business”.  Tilden told automobile owners that “we have bought the best machinery and tools that money could buy, and have secured the services of one of the best repair men in the state.” In a nod to his existing customers he said; “Don’t forget we are still in the carriage and wagon repair business.”

In the spring of 1917 Tilden placed a newspaper advertisement for the Smith Form-a-Truck which could be attached to a Model-T chassis.  Advertising for the Form-a-Truck claimed that for the price of one “good team and harness” the truck could do the work of four horses and that when “the engine stops your cost stops”.  Norman Tilden was further distancing himself from his former horse related business.

That same year Norman Tilden, now 57 years old, decided to sell his business. He had built the building in the spring of 1890 and opened Tilden Wagon Shop. Twenty seven years later, having watched the emergence of the automobile, he decided to sell out.

Norman Tilden was born into the age of the buggy. He lived across Lincoln Avenue from his business and walked to work each day.  However, it should be said that he wasn’t a man that resisted the change he watched coming.  His business had evolved along with changes in technology. In 1915 he offered for sell an automobile called the Argo. It was an electric car that was almost a century ahead of its time.

George Rodgers, an automobile insurance salesman, purchased the business.  The auto repair business continued under the management of Norman Tilden and a Hupmobile dealership was added.  The building, often referred to as Tilden’s Old Stand, continued to serve automobile owners under various owners until it was demolished in 1929.

Early in 1929 the city council was asked to use zoning laws to define the business district limits. A story in a local newspaper, the New Teller, said that residents on north Lincoln Avenue were concerned about the “encroachment of business and industry on territory which home owners in the vicinity feel should be left sacred to dwelling houses.” It was not the first time that the issue had been brought up with city officials. This time the target was a builder named Ora Clark.

Residents were concerned that Clark was piling lumber near 11^th and Lincoln. Some of that lumber was likely to be used on a building he was planning for the site of Tilden’s former shop. Later that year he built a 60 x 110 foot brick garage building with a front of ornamental brick, terra cotta and tile “in keeping with the ideals of the business district.” The building was home to a series of automobile dealerships and is now commonly known as the former Moses Ford building.

Some of the zoning concerns of Lincoln Avenue residents surely were the result of the demolition in 1920 of the F.O. Bell house which sat on the northwest corner of 9^th and Lincoln Avenue. F.O. Bell was the first person to successfully settle in York. Shortly after the town had been plated, he arrived in York and operated a general store out of the former claim shack which sat at the current site of Nebraskaland Glass. Mr. Bell prospered and eventually built his family a home at 905 Lincoln Avenue, one block north of the business district. He had bought the corner lot for five dollars in 1871 and added the adjoining lot at a cost of $25 in 1875. His brick French Second Empire house was built circa 1875.

In 1919 Oscar Rystrom bought the property and replaced the 45 year old house with a building that housed a Dodge dealership. The building featured stain glass windows and terra cotta decorations. A close look at the building today reveals a terracotta R near the roofline, an architectural reminder left behind by the original owner.  

 

The extension of the business district north up Lincoln Avenue faced the headwinds of a depressed farm economy following WWI and the Depression. In 1939 the Rystrom Company decided to close the business. The building became the property of the holder of the original mortgage at a cost of just $1100. The company had apparently been unable to retire the debt during the 29 years it was in business.

In 1917 Standard Oil Company built a “beautiful up-to-date oil filling station” on the southwest corner of 9^th and Lincoln. The York Daily News-Times reported that the company would “landscape and beautify the grounds.” That description is in keeping with Standard Oil policy in those years of building bungalow style buildings with landscaping. The filling stations mimicked a house in a nod to the residential character of some of the locations where new stations were being built.

Not all Lincoln Avenue houses were razed. When plans for the new filling station were announced it was reported that the house on the site was being moved to 324 W. Tenth. The house movers planned “to make some changes in the house so that it [would] be convenient and modern throughout”.

As a testament to the fact that change is constant, the site of The Farmers Exchange/York Auto Co. building is a parking lot. Ora Clark’s garage is now home to human services agencies.

The Rystrom Building is home to Penner’s Tire and Auto. When Penner’s relocated to the corner of 9^th and Lincoln in the late 1980’s it marked a return to that intersection of the name Penner.  Shorty Penner had operated the Standard Oil station before moving to a more modern location at 6^th and Nebraska Ave.

Valentino’s Pizza now occupies the much modified Standard Oil building that still reveals its former role as a filling station. The diagonal front of the building originally accommodated cars pulling up to the pump.  Closed up, but still visible, garage door openings bear witness to two former service bays.  

Pushed by changes in transportation technology, while at the same time restrained by the economic realities, the York business district continued to expanded north up Lincoln Avenue. Today just three houses remain in that area to remind us of a day when life was lived at the pace of a pedestrian or a horse drawn vehicle.